


Haunted

by pega



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Richie sees ghosts, character study kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 23:10:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20768471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pega/pseuds/pega
Summary: Richie’s career keeps getting bigger and better, and Jackson stops asking Richie if he’s seeing anyone.How could Richie answer? He sees people all the time, people that aren’t there, and he’s pretty sure that’s not the kind of reply that bodes well for a guy already suspected to be taking every drug imaginable.





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GoldStarGrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/gifts).

Richie Tozier used to write his own material, once.

“So, controversial opinion - ghosts are totally real. Why am I willing to stake all of my two bit credibility on a batshit crazy premise? I’m haunted, motherfuckers.”

The Chicago Tribune called his show ‘a surprisingly tolerable foray into premise heavy stand-up’. The audience chuckled, at least. They didn’t laugh, because maybe even then, there was more than a hint of truth in his voice, and it’s hard to laugh at something like that. 

That show was enough to get a manager though. Jane is strict, no nonsense, with a sense of humor that seems more at home with an eighty year old retiree than a sharply dressed twenty five year old woman, and for a moment one of Richie’s ghosts is there, a boy with soft curls happily reveling in not being understood before fluttering away like a blue jay, and how does a sensation like being haunted feel so comforting?

Jane takes one look at Richie’s vacant expression and snaps her fingers. “You with me, Rich?”

He shrugs. He’s as ‘with her’ as he ever is, with anyone. Jane visibly decides that that will be enough.

Jane hires a man to write his material. He has broad shoulders, and Richie is startled when words tumble out of Jackson’s mouth like smooth river stones. Shoulders like that shouldn’t be able to carry the world without a few visible pressure points, Richie thinks, but the thought is gone before he can fully turn it over in his mind. 

Once Jackson starts writing his material, Richie stops talking about ghosts.

It doesn’t mean he stops seeing them.

There’s a girl who lives two floors down from his first LA apartment that smells like cigarette smoke, all the time, even though no one in LA smokes, and certainly not yoga nuts like Catherine. 

He’s at a park once, and there’s a little kid with a shovel and a bucket full of sand that makes him think of roundness and softness, even though this particular rugrat is all elbows and knees. 

A barista with kind eyes always offers him extra whipped foam and a hand shake, and sometimes Richie wants to call him by a name that’s certainly not on his name tag, and sometimes Richie wants to tell him to sit down, stop working, and talk about the latest thing he’s read. But he never sees this barista read, of course he doesn’t, this guy is working at the busiest corner cafe in West Hollywood. 

Richie’s career keeps getting bigger and better, and Jackson stops asking Richie if he’s seeing anyone.

How could Richie answer? He sees people all the time, people that aren’t there, and he’s pretty sure that’s not the kind of reply that bodes well for a guy already suspected to be taking every drug imaginable.

He doesn’t. Take drugs, that is. He’s been offered many times, so many times, but the strongest ghost comes through then, screaming about cross contamination and bacteria and heart attacks, and Richie doesn’t.

This is what being an adult is, probably. Being haunted by people you can’t remember, dealing with semi-permanent dejavu. 

It only takes a phone call for that fucking theory to unravel. 

Apparently, it’s a Young Adult Novel, Chosen One type of bullshit reserved only for people who demonstrated the ultimate hubris and moved away from their hometown too young and too hard.

Richie didn’t even know he grew up in Maine. He’s been telling people it was Connecticut. It’s all obnoxiously WASP-y all the way down, the difference didn’t seem big at the time, but now it feels massive. It feels glaring. It feels like he’s forgetting things even now.

Richie books a plane and cancels his shows. Jane and Jackson make concerned faces, but their eyes look relieved. Richie made them too nervous as a client, always felt like too much of a flight risk, and he takes perverse pleasure in proving them right. 

The restaurant Mike sends them to feels like the butt of a hell of a lot of bad jokes, and maybe the champion of some good ones. Richie hasn’t felt like telling a good joke in a while, but something in him is loosening the longer he’s here, the longer he’s in this one horse town that he apparently ran away from as a teen. 

When he sees Eddie, it’s like he’s been hit by a truck, and the truck is carrying all the homework he’s forgotten to do for the past twenty seven years.

_ How the hell did I procrastinate on my goddamn sexuality? _

_ How the hell did I FORGET to grow up, forget to get real, forget to get ready for this, I’m not ready for this, not ready for him- _

Eddie smiles at him. “I knew it, I knew that I knew you when I saw you on the TV!”

Richie thinks he’s grinning too big, but that’s certainly not going to stop anytime soon. The whole group swarms before he can reply, and that’s a bummer, but it’s okay, because there’s this feeling of Here, and a feeling of Home, and Richie didn’t realize how hollow the past two decades were, but now he does, and now he’s getting full and drunk on this feeling of everything clicking back to where it ought to be.

Later, when things have gone bad and grey again, Richie wonders if there’s some cosmic spreadsheet that he’s a part of, where he’s playing victim to the whims of an overpowered accountant who uses him to even the balance in any direction they can. 

It’s exhausting whether it’s true or just grief making him crazy. 

He doesn’t mean that hyperbolically.

Richie is haunted now, really actually haunted, not the flashes from before but fully formed spectres of two boys he loved (albeit in different ways, can’t count how differently the love was, but it added up to love all the same).

He thinks about mentioning it to Bill, or maybe Bev, but he ultimately shrugs and accepts it as the penance for getting caught in the deadlights. Bev was haunted by their deaths, all those years ago, haunted by the future.

Richie is haunted by the past, and that’s something he can live with. 

Besides, this way he gets Stan whispering non sequiturs in his ear.

This way, he gets Eddie calling him an asshole whenever he doesn’t properly sanitize his dishes. 

Richie starts working on his own material. It comes out better than his old stuff. This time, he has editors he doesn’t want to let down. This time, he has living friends in the front row, and dead friends floating beside his bar stool and free glass of water. 

If Richie Tozier is haunted by anything, he’s haunted by the unspeakable excess of his life, and that’s fitting, really, that the kid with the big mouth too loud for his punchable face became the speaker for all these people, all these losers.


End file.
